Photo by: Pavel Danilyuk courtesy of Pexel.com

Warren Buffet famously said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” Brands today know that reputation is key in the business world, that’s why they put so much effort into finding a business name that tells customers all about their values.

While most business founders throw themselves into building their brand’s reputation, fewer understand the importance of domain reputation. This isn’t a case of asking what your customers think of you. It’s the opinion of a more shadowy group: the mail providers, ISPs, and anti-spam services who determine who’s in and who’s out of your customers’ inbox.

Domain reputation plays a significant role in the efficacy of your email marketing campaign. Learning how to improve won’t just see your emails received, but well-received by your audience because the right content will reach the right people.

The result? Happy customers, strong customer service, and, yeah, a great reputation. Let’s find out all about it.

What is Domain Reputation?

Domain reputation is a score assigned to your domain by mailbox providers like Gmail, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and anti-spam services to determine the overall quality of your domain for email purposes. A poor domain reputation will lead your emails to be marked as spam, or go undelivered altogether.

The domain in discussion is the one you send emails from. If your email address is angela@coolbiz.com or offers@coolbiz.com, the domain coolbiz.com has an assigned reputation.

Domain reputation is like a credit score for your email marketing campaigns. Financial providers assign your credit score based on your financial behavior such as your debt and the regularity of your payments, and use this data to limit the lines of credit you can receive.

Similarly, domain reputation is assigned based on your email marketing performance (among other factors) and mail providers will limit where your emails are received if you have a bad reputation.

While we talk about domain reputation in the singular, in fact, your domain has many different reputations with the individual mail providers and ISPs it interacts with. Just like there’s no one credit scorer, and many financial institutions perform their own calculations, mail providers like Google, Yahoo, Outlook, and more have private algorithms that calculate domain reputation.

Why is Domain Reputation Important?

Around 45% of emails are marked as spam and one in six never make it to a recipient’s inbox at all. With over 3 million emails sent every second, your email marketing campaign is taking place in one of the most competitive environments for your audience’s attention.

Domain reputation plays a major role in determining whether your emails are received in the inbox or spam folder, and a very poor domain reputation can lead to email receiver services blocking your emails altogether.

Here’s why domain reputation matters:

• Email open rate declines.
• Engagement and conversion will fall.
• Customer service is hurt as valuable emails are not received.
• Damage to your brand’s credibility.
• Emails are blocked or sent to spam folders

When was the last time you checked your spam folder? A quarter of people only check a few times a year, while 15% never check it at all. A poor domain reputation can start a vicious cycle, leading to worsening engagement that in turn contributes to a further damaged reputation. Ultimately, your domain could be blacklisted and blocked altogether.

Given that under half of received emails are opened, and there’s an average clickthrough rate of 2 – 3%, email marketing is an uphill battle. But the first step is gaining a strong domain reputation — and strong domain name — that sees your emails received and valued by customers.

How is Domain Reputation Calculated?

Domain reputation is calculated through a range of factors, including email engagement and spam scores, but most mail receiver services keep the details of the algorithms that determine domain reputation a close-kept secret. Few mail providers or ISPs will even reveal your domain reputation.

This prevents spammers and scammers from learning how to game the system, but it also poses a problem for legitimate businesses. Whether you recently bought a domain with a poor reputation or you mismanaged your email lists for some time, it’s important to know your domain reputation and diagnose the problem if your email marketing campaigns are underperforming.

6 Factors that Impact Domain Reputation

While few mail providers reveal the algorithms that determine domain reputation, we do know the factors that affect it. Here’s what contributes to domain reputation.

1. Weak email marketing engagement

One thing we know is that mail providers are tracking email engagement rates. That means that poor email open rates and high unsubscribe rates will hit your domain reputation. In general, poor email list management will damage important metrics and lead to a lower domain reputation.

2. Inconsistent email volume

Find an email cadence that’s right for you and your customers, but remain consistent and avoid long gaps between emails, or clusters of emails sent in short time frames.

3. Emailing spam traps

Spam traps are fake email addresses operated by mail providers and blacklisting services to identify poor email marketing practices. These emails are sometimes buried in website code (and could only be discovered by nefarious practices) or dormant email addresses that identify out-of-date email lists.

4. Blacklisting

ISPs, mail providers, and private blacklisting services block domains and IP addresses based on problematic activity. If your emails are frequently marked as spam by recipients then you’ll be at risk of blacklisting and your domain reputation will suffer.

5. Domain age

Newer domains are generally less trustworthy than older domains and will have a weaker domain reputation, partly because receivers have less information to confidently assess information. Don’t send cold emails with a brand new domain — warm up a new domain by sending manual emails for a few months to build your domain reputation.

6. Domain Style

Your choice of domain, in both name and TLD (top-level domain), could set you off to a poor start in domain reputation. Spammers often use a churn-and-burn strategy, registering and discarding domains to reach as many inboxes as possible.  The top-level domains they favor can gain an in-built reputation for spam. Conversely, using the gold-standard TLD .com or a more expensive TLD like .io could help your domain reputation.

How to Check Your Domain Reputation

Most receivers won’t tell you your domain reputation score, except for Google who will provide the data as long as you have enough volume to anonymize it. There are ways to assess your domain reputation, though. Here are the best tools around.

1. Google Postmaster

The Google Postmaster Tool gives you insight into a range of email metrics including spam rate, domain reputation, IP reputation, and authentication results. While this tool only covers emails sent to Gmail accounts, this is the most popular email provider in the world making it likely a good proportion of your email list is included particularly if you’re in the B2C world.

To get started, sign into Postmaster Tools, add and authenticate your domain, and see your domain reputation, which Google rates on a scale from a four-point scale from Low to High.

2. Talos Intelligence

Talos Intelligence, a tool from Cisco, aggregates data from multiple sources to provide an assessment of your domain reputation. The service also indicates if you’re on any blacklists and provides a support ticket service if your reputation is low.

3. Third-Party Services

Third-party services like Barracuda’s reputation lookup tool let you determine if your domain is marked as spam within their database of domains and IP addresses.

4. Blacklist Check Services

Blacklist check services scan public blocklists. One example, MxToolBox, provides a domain and IP blacklist checker, as well as offering email deliverability diagnostic services. You can perform a free blacklist check by entering your domain name.

How to Improve Your Domain Reputation

Warren Buffet thought it took 20 years to build a reputation, but fortunately, in the digital age things move a little faster. Fixing or improving your domain reputation may not take 20 years, but it still takes work. Here’s what to do.

• Warm up a new domain by sending manual emails to engaged users, before trying cold emailing.
• Use a double opt-in process to verify email subscribers.
• Provide only relevant content your audience wants to see.
• Avoid using spam trigger words.
• Proactively clean your email lists by performing email verification to identify and remove invalid subscribers.
• Maintain consistency in the volume of emails you send.
• Follow Gmail’s sender guidelines.
• Authenticate the sender domain with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC compliance.
• Keep DNS records up to date.
• Use a reputable TLD for your email campagins.
• Consider using a subdomain or separate domain for cold outreach campaigns.
• Target highly active recipients to fast-forward your recovery.
• Reach out to blacklist services to be removed.

Wrapping Up

We’ve all had the experience of being rejected by a nightclub bouncer with “not tonight, buddy” echoing in our ears, and a sudden concern for our inappropriate shoes in our hearts. A poor domain reputation means your valuable emails miss out on the party of your customer’s inbox, and it’s not as simple as coming back tomorrow sporting your best brogues.

While a bad domain reputation hinders customer communications, a good reputation is a valuable long-term business asset. It’s transferable across mail providers and IP addresses, as long as you’re using that domain as the root of your email marketing. As an asset, it’s worth investing in.

Given that a powerful, recognizable domain name will provide instant trust and credibility among your audience, a strong domain gives you the best start toward domain reputation. Shop Atom’s Domains Marketplace to find the domain name that your customers want to click on.

What is Domain Reputation FAQs:

What is the difference between IP and domain reputation?

IP reputation is the assessment of the IP address your mail sender is using, while domain reputation is linked to the root domain of your web address — everything that comes after the @ in the email address. Your domain reputation is fixed to that name, while your IP address might fluctuate when you change mail server.

What is the difference between domain authority and domain reputation?

Domain authority is a metric developed by SEO and marketing brand Moz to assess how well a website is likely to rank in SERPs (search engine results pages), making it a function of a website’s SEO. Domain reputation is a score given by mailbox providers to determine the legitimacy and spam content of an email address.

What is a good domain reputation score?

85 to 100 is a good domain reputation, based on domain reputation checker Sender Score by Validity which rates domains on a scale from 0 – 100. However, most mail providers and anti-spam services don’t publicize the algorithm or mechanism, which hides the way they score domain reputation. Google Postmaster Tools rates domains on a four-point scale: Bad, Low, Medium/Fair, High, with domains considered fair or high having a strong delivery rate.

How long does it take to fix domain reputation?

It can take a few weeks to several months to fix a bad domain reputation. The duration will depend on the overall score, whether the domain is on any blacklists, and the quality of the email marketing lists and engaged recipients the domain has to work with.